This is a free short story for the Kindle if you're an Amazon Prime member. If you're not, it's 99 cents. I read it last night. Gideon Miles is a great character, and his attempt to fetch a fugitive in Little Ridge is great entertainment. Check it out.

Amazon.com: Miles to Little Ridge eBook: Heath Lowrance: Kindle Store: Edward A.Grainger's Gideon Miles hits the trail in this fast-clip western novella written by Heath Lowrance. The U.S. Marshal finds himself in the sleepy town of Little Ridge, Montana, on the search for a wanted man. But just as Miles enters town, he's spotted by a hard case who recognizes Miles as the lawman that killed his friend. Now Miles must face the wanted man, who claims his innocence and is raising a daughter on his own, while the hard case and a ne'er-do-well partner are gunning for him.

- NYTimes.com: Bob Burnett, who blended his smooth tenor tones into the harmonies of the original folk-revival group the Highwaymen (“original” because another group later, somewhat contentiously, adopted the name), died on Wednesday at his home in East Providence, R.I. He was 71.

KUT News: Dan “Bee” Spears, Willie Nelson’s bass player for more than four decades, has died at the age of 62. Spears’ girlfriend Dee Pearce said Spears slipped and fell while exiting his motor home near Nashville on Thursday night and died from exposure to the elements, KXAN reported.

O’DOUL by Wayne D. Dundee BookHound: For the price of a soft drink (not the over-priced hotel fare, I’m talking about a coke for a buck), you can enjoy Wayne D. Dundee’s novella, O’Doul, and you can read it over lunch on your phone or e-reader. Dundee, like many other Western/mystery writers, produces good stories in both genres. His Joe Hannibal novels belong on every private eye reader’s shelves.

Play to win free books! Go here for an explanation of the contest and for a list of the many blogs where clues can be found.

Clues for Day 7 -- written by Lauren

Working in publishing means I read all day, in one form or another. If I’m not reading queries, a client’s new contract or industry blogs, I’m reading exciting requested material from an author I’m planning to offer representation. When I’m not reading all of that, I’m reading something new to review on my blog. I used to read a book or two a week for pleasure, even all through college. Now, I’ve had to cut out almost all pleasure reading—I watch TV instead as a way to turn off my brain for a while. But when vacations come around, I plan my reading list like a new bride plans her honeymoon wardrobe. And then I tell all my friends and colleagues about what I just can’t wait to read and not criticize. This Christmas break, I’m planning to read three books I just can’t wait to get my hands on. I’ve spent extra time picking them out because I can’t risk choosing something I’ll regret. Which three books are my Christmas selections for 2011?

My clues: Book 1: T. S. Eliot's merchant hatches one. Book 2: Rio has Carnival. This similar event is from Ireland (in a manner of speaking). Book 3: The numbers add up to 15.

The Raw Story: An independent US filmmaker has made what is believed to be the first feature-length movie shot with a smartphone, to be released next week — with actress Gena Rowlands in the starring role.

Army Men: Technically not all these guys are Army men, some are Soldiers and Marines. And they're true to the original Vietnam era Louis Marx & Co. toys you grew up with... with a couple differences. Their heads have been substituted for a Jack Skull and these ones are solid Sterling Silver. They'll capture the imagination and rekindle that urge to play. A drop of crazy glue on the base and you can keep your own security force perched atop your monitor and looking over your shoulder.

Yeah, I know. You remember this one, too, but it's been out of print since 1984, so I figure it qualifies. If there's a more recent edition, let us know in the comments.

This is a collection of Bradbury's very early crime stories, some of his first fiction sales. It comes complete with a short but revealing introduction that explains why the book is dedicated to Leigh Brackett.

One of the stories in the book, "Small Assassin," is likely to be familiar to a lot of readers, but that's the only one. The others, from places like Dime Mystery Magazine and Detective Tales, probably aren't. These aren't great stories, but they're interesting if you care about the development of a young writer who really hit his stride a few years after their publication. Not essential, but certainly worth a little of your time.

NY Daily News: Jerry Robinson, the pioneering comic book artist credited with creating Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker, and later a crusading hero for cartoonists in his own right who helped restore “Superman’s” creators’ rights in a single bound, died in his sleep Wednesday night. He was 89.

PI Truman Smith has become a loner after failing to find his sister Jan during a recent search of Galveston Island. He jogs on the Seawall, plays with his cat, and reads lots of Faulkner books. He is pulled from his self-imposed retirement when his old high-school football buddy Dino asks him to find a young girl named Sharon. As Tru begins his investigation, dead bodies begin to appear and Tru himself is attacked. His search for Sharon takes him to all sorts of interesting places on and near the Island.

Bill Crider spins a good mystery tale in a wonderful setting with interesting characters and enough plot twists to keep listeners guessing until the last few chapters.

The Raw Story: Australian scientists on Thursday hailed the discovery of a pair of insect-like eyes belonging to a freakish prehistoric super-predator which trawled the seas more than 500 million years ago.

NPR: Soul music lost one of its great voices last week. Singer Howard Tate died Friday after a battle with cancer at the age of 72. Tate had made his name with a string of classic records including "Get It While You Can," before sliding into obscurity and addiction. But Tate got sober, found religion and he enjoyed a successful encore career over the past decade.

Paris Review – Document: The Symbolism Survey, Sarah Funke Butler: In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.

A veteran of more than 50 years in films and TV, Morgan starred or co-starred in 11 TV series. He was an appealing Everyman whose calm manner and wry delivery were widely popular. In M*A*S*H*, his steady ways and wry humor tempered the more high-keyed natures of his co-star’s characters, Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John. He went on to co-star in its spin-off, AfterMASH (1984-85).

My post on Dark City inspired Walter Satterthwait to alert me to the fact that Alex Proyas is filming Paradise Lost. And Rufus Sewell is in it. Casey Affleck is playing Gabriel. It's in 3-D. No word on whether the actors will be speaking Milton's glorious iambic pentameter, but I certainly hope so.

The Hollywood Reporter: Singer and songwriter Dobie Gray, who had a top 5 hit in 1973 with the song “Drift Away,” has died. The news came on the evening of Dec. 6 via his official website, although no cause of death was listed.

Attack on Pearl Harbor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The attack on Pearl Harbor (called Hawaii Operation or Operation AI[6][7] by the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters (Operation Z in planning)[8] and the Battle of Pearl Harbor[9]) was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941 (December 8 in Japan). The attack was intended as a preventive action in order to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering with military actions the Empire of Japan was planning in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States.

This is the world of the Fathomless Abyss, a bottomless pit that opens who-knows-when onto who-knows-where, just long enough for new people from a thousand different worlds and a million different times to fall in and join the fight for survival in place where the slightest misstep means an everlasting fall into eternity.

Tales from the Fathomless Abyss features six new short stories, and it’s only the beginning. From here, each author will branch out to spin a series of new books sharing this impossible, explosive, infinite setting.

Play to win free books! Go here for an explanation of the contest and for a list of the many blogs where clues can be found.

Day 4 (Posted December 6, 2011 - Lauren) :

When I first started out in the publishing world, I interned at two different companies. My first internship was a bold introduction to commercial publishing where I learned my first two valuable lessons in publishing: 1. Publishing is about art and money, but rarely only one or the other. All books are art. All books need to make money. The best, most successful books are those that blend these elements well. 2. Just because I wouldn’t personally read a book for pleasure doesn’t mean there isn’t a healthy audience of those who would.

My second internship was where I fell in love with publishing and learned the ropes as completely as I could. I find that I still learn things—daily.

At which companies did I complete these two internships?

My clues: The first company is in the bag ; the second one is a giveaway.

Fast Five, in case you don't know, stars both Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, the artist formerly known as The Rock. After Judy and I watched this movie, I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning testosterone residue out of the DVD player and off the TV screen. It was worth it, though, because this movie has everything you could possibly want except gratuitous nudity.

Let's start with the script. It makes absolutely no sense at all. But who cares, right? Does anybody actually watch a movie like this because of the script? Of course not. You watch if for fast cars, explosions, lots of shooting, goofy stunts, and guys who stand around and bulge their muscles at each other. And that's what you get.

Now, about those stunts. Does anybody watch a movie like this for realistic action sequences. Of course not. You watch it for stuff that clearly impossible anywhere outside of the imagination of a screenwriter desperate to come up with something even more preposterous than he did the last time he wrote an action movie. Stuff you can laugh at rather than believe in. And that's what you get.

As for acting, we already know nobody watches movies like this for the acting. If they did, Laurence Olivier might have become an action star. What you want is snappy patter in something more or less resembling English. And that's what you get, except for the snappy patter in something more or less resembling other languages.

Bromance? You got it. Romance? A little. Happy ending (except for the guy with the "I Am Going to Get Killed" sign hanging around his neck)? You got it.

Houston News: . . . these two geniuses swiped the digital camera on which these photos were taken (along with a laptop, TV, and a Wii) and then pawned it in Houston. Unfortunately for these two brainboxes, they forgot to delete the candid headshots they took with the camera before they hocked it.

I was lucky enough to see Dark City in the theater when it first opened. I loved it. I thought at the time that it was the best P. K. Dick movie around, even if it wasn't based on a P. K. Dick story. Apparently not many people agreed with me, as the movie wasn't a hit. I thought it would be, which proves once again that my powers of prediction are negligible.

The story opens in the way of so many paperback originals that I can't count them. A man wakes up with no memory of who he is or how he came to be where he is (in a bathtub). He has blood on him, and, sure enough, there's a dead body nearby. And then things get really weird. No one knows what's real and what's not real because The Strangers are implanting people with false memories. Perception and reality are twisted so that it seems as if nobody really knows what's going on.

Monday, December 05, 2011

Darrell K. Sweet, 1934-2011 | Tor.com: It is with tremendous sadness that I report that Darrell K. Sweet passed away this morning. Since the mid 1970s, Darrell’s illustrations defined many of fantasy’s most beloved series—including Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time—among literally thousands of genre book covers. An avid history buff, Darrell also spent much of his time painting frontiersmen and the American West. His paintings evoked the classic storytelling narration of the Golden Age illustrators. A Sweet cover promised an adventure to be had.�

Amazon.com: The Nighttime is the Righttime eBook: Bill Crider: Kindle Store: The Nighttime is the Right Time is a collection of short fiction from the author of the popular Sheriff Dan Rhodes series. In these 11 previously published tales, we meet a detective who also happens to be a werewolf; investigate two separate missing-animal cases; tag along with series characters Carl Burns (the amateur-sleuth English teacher) and Dan Rhodes; watch Elvis Presley hunting a vampire; and check out a handful of other interesting puzzles. Crider is a very smooth writer: his prose is always lively, and his characters are always fun to hang around with. (His fans will notice that a couple of the stories here are much harder-edged than usual; he can be quite dark, when he wants to be.) A must read for fans of mystery, and darker fantasy tales. There will even be a few stories for fans of a certain Jack MacLane, whose work Bill Crider is intimately familiar with...

AboutSF: The Center for the Study of Science Fiction (CSSF), in association with the University of Kansas, announces the launch of James Gunn’s Ad Astra, an online resource for authors, scholars and all those who are interested in speculative fiction at http://adastra.ku.edu/.

NASA: NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the "habitable zone," the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets.

Play to win free books! Go here for an explanation of the contest and for a list of the many blogs where clues can be found.

Today's Question: What piece did Kim have to memorize in her 10th grade English class and who wrote it? And what author did Kim do her 11th-grade presentation on and what’s the title of that author's most famous work?

My clues: You're dreaming if you think the answers have anything to do with going house to house and singing Christmas songs.

Sunday, December 04, 2011

Amazon.com: Just Before Dark eBook: Jack MacLane: Kindle Store: It’s just an old junkyard, a place where Lane Hamner loved to play among the rusty old car bodies. But you never know what you might find in a junkyard, especially when your uncle isn’t the kindly old gentleman you think he is. He’s actually the kind of man who would put someone into a car that’s about to be run through the crusher, just to get rid of him.

Frank Castella isn’t so easy to get rid of, however. When his spirit takes over the junkyard, bent on revenge, a lot of people are going to die, and Frank isn’t going to make it easy on them.

The Nero Award is presented each year to an author for the best American Mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe stories. It is presented at the Black Orchid Banquet, traditionally held on the first Saturday in December in New York City. The "Nero" is considered one of the premier awards granted to authors of crime fiction.

This year, the winner is Louise Penny for Bury Your Dead(Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group). Her award was presented by Jane K. Cleland, chair of the Wolfe Pack's literary awards.

The Wolfe Pack, founded in 1977, is a forum to discuss, explore, and enjoy the 72 Nero Wolfe books and novellas written by Rex Stout. The organization promotes fellowship and extends friendship to those who enjoy these great literary works of mystery through a series of events, book discussions, and a journal devoted to the study of the genius detective, Nero Wolfe, and his intrepid assistant, Archie Goodwin. The organization has more than 500 members worldwide.